Redditor Returns $60K of Lost ‘Magic: The Gathering’ Cards

What would you do if you found thousands of dollars neatly packaged in a binder—with no name or address to make you feel guilty about taking it? For one New York Comic Con attendee, that question wasn’t hypothetical: It was a real-life moral test the universe placed before him at a convention honoring fictional superheroes.

Redditor Lolhentai4ever, also known as Andrew, was at Javits Center in Midtown Manhattan when he discovered a binder someone had lost full of “ridiculously expensive” Magic: The Gathering cards.

How expensive?

In the binder’s pages, Andrew noticed a few standout cards, including a foil (read: rarer and more expensive) “Liliana of the Veil,” which TCG Player prices between $204–$279.99. That’s almost $300 for a single playing card.

Think that’s a lot?

Andrew also noticed the binder was carrying “most of the Power Nine,” a reference to nine of the earliest-printed, rarest, and most powerful cards in the game. A full set of the Power Nine can go for almost $17,000 on eBay.

And those were just a few of the cards in the binder—making the total package some tremendously valuable loot to stumble across at Comic Con.

Diamonds and burlap sacks conveniently labeled with dollar signs might be more popular items to steal in Hollywood heist films, but petty thieves often steal and resell Magic: The Gathering cards—whether they’re worth $1,500 or $25,000.

But perhaps being around all of those Batman and Spiderman cosplayers over the weekend filled Andrew with the superhero spirit.

Instead of pocketing the cards and reselling them, he issued a call to the most likely place for the owner to find him: Reddit’s magicTCG community, which has 144,846 card-carrying members.

Andrew described the binder and asked the owner to verify the contents as proof, concluding his post by saying, “Whoever (and I hope they see this post) knows about this, please send me a PM and we can work things out.”

Meanwhile, Tom Grayson, the 50-something owner of said binder, was having a very shitty Comic Con.

Grayson has collected Magic: The Gathering cards for over 20 years. He first started in 1994. To give you some perspective, the game debuted in 1993. So yeah, he liked Magic before it was (un?)cool.

When Grayson misplaced the binder at New York Comic Con, he was understandably distraught. In a Reddit post after the event, he shares, “I honestly can’t even describe how upset I was.”

Among Grayson’s most prized cards was a Beta Black Lotus. A single near-mint copy of this card runs $10,000 and up. (One mint condition Beta Black Lotus was listed for $100,000.) He estimates the entire binder is worth “approximately $60,000.”

But the loss represented more than just unrecoupable costs.

“Magic: The Gathering to me is an over 20 year long hobby,” he explains in his post. “It’s one of the most important things I have in my life, next to my wife and daughters.”

In a tragic bit of dramatic irony, Grayson was unaware of Andrew’s post to the magicTCG community. “I don’t go to Reddit very often and have never bothered making an account,” he admits.

But as virtual serendipity would have it, his friend was a user who noticed the “lost binder” post and immediately put the pair in touch.

Early Monday morning, Grayson boarded a train, then hopped in a taxi, and rang the doorbell at the house of his hero—holding a dessert tart as a modest thank you gift.

Though he was prepared to give Andrew a financial reward, the good Samaritan rejected the money, proposing a simple counteroffer: Stay, eat the tart, and play a few games of Magic: The Gathering.

Grayson happily obliged, but when it was time to go, he couldn’t leave his hero empty-handed. He changed his reward to something Andrew couldn’t pass up: He could choose to keep two cards from the binder.

Passing up the highly desirable Beta Black Lotus and Liliana of the Veil, Andrew went with “an expedition Wooded Foothills” for his “Atarka Red deck” and a “Glorious Anthem Promo.”

Even if you have no idea what any of those words means, you can understand the gesture when you see the Wooded Foothills’ retail value: $85.